Reading a file in Lua can be done using the io library. Here's an example code snippet that demonstrates how to read a file in Lua:
--Open the file in read-only mode
local file = io.open("example.txt", "r")
--Read the contents of the file
local contents = file:read("*all")
--Close the file
file:close()
--Print the contents of the file
print(contents)
In this code snippet, we use io.open to open the file in read-only mode. The first argument is the name of the file we want to open, and the second argument, "r", specifies that we want to open the file in read-only mode.
Next, we use file:read("*all") to read the entire contents of the file into a Lua string. We then close the file using file:close().
Finally, we print the contents of the file using print(contents).
Note that the io.open function returns a file handle, which we can use to perform other file operations. For example, if we want to read the file line by line, we can use file:read("*line") instead of file:read("*all"). We can also specify the number of bytes we want to read using file:read(n), where n is the number of bytes we want to read.